'The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, "Let me go, for the day is breaking." But Jacob said, "I will not let you go, unless you bless me." So he said to him, "What is your name?" And he said, "Jacob." Then the man said, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Then Jacob asked him, "Please tell me your name." But he said, "Why is it that you ask my name?" And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved." The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.'
--Genesis 32: 22-31
'Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.' For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"'
--Luke 18: 1-8
I have a confession to make. I am closet fan of professional wrestling. I got hooked when I was in high school, thanks to Kenny Mullins, the senior in my 8th grade algebra class who said to me one week, “Just watch it!” I did and it was all over. After about 10 years I gave it up like a lot of fans do – it was just too weird at that point – but even though I don’t watch much, I pay attention to what’s going on, listen to a weekly wrestling podcast, and am still fascinated by it. It may be predetermined or performative, but at its core it represents something fundamental about the human condition: the struggle between the babyface good guy and the heel bad guy, and in the end there is always closure to their conflict.
So however crude or rudimentary it may be, pro wrestling is what I first thought about when I read our passages from Genesis and Luke this week. In Genesis we find Jacob running for his life, and to be honest, he’s kind of the heel in this story. He has cheated his brother Essau of his birthright, stolen a blessing from their father Isaac that was reserved for Essau, and altogether cheated and lied to get what he wants. Essau is out to get Jacob, who we find in our reading on a mountain where he wrestles all night with a stranger. It is widely accepted that this stranger is some kind of earthly form for God. All night long they struggle, grappling with one another. It’s a slober-knocker, as the legendary wrestling announcer Jim Ross would say. God knocks out Jacob’s hip, but Jacob is relentless and won’t quit until he receives a blessing. When morning comes the blessing is granted, God gives to Jacob a new name, ‘Israel’ – literally, one who wrestles with God. Jacob even names the place where the contest took place ‘Peniel’ – the face of God. Wrestlemania’s got nothing on this bout.
We generally associate the name Israel today with a specific place, the state of Israel that was founded in 1948, but throughout the Scriptures the name is not a reference to a geographic location. The earliest Scriptures of our Old Testament, the Hebrew Tanakh, were put down during the days of the Babylonian Exile, meaning that there was no kingdom or country called Israel during the entire time the Jewish and Christian Scriptures were written. Instead, ‘Israel,’ as it appears in the Bible, is a reference to a group of people, to the descendants of the one who wrestled with God on that mountain. And we see that population of people continue that tradition of wrestling with God, don’t we? We see it generations after Jacob is gone when the Hebrew people are enslaved in Egypt and then wander through the dessert to find their home. We see it in the aforementioned Babylonian Exile and the words of the Prophets and the Psalms written during that tumultuous time. We see it in the anguish experienced by Jesus’ own people in the Gospels as they live under Roman occupation. And certainly, in the years since, through the Inquisitions, pogroms, and Holocausts that have tried to destroy them, this persistent population knows what it means to wrestle with God because it literally is their name.
That same persistence is what Jesus is articulating in the parable from the Gospel of Luke. Let’s be honest, this is not an easy parable to understand, is it? If the judge in the story – often called the Unjust Judge – is a stand-in for God, it sure looks like he’s a bit of a jerk. He refuses to grant the widow’s request time and time again; she finally wears him out until he gives in to her demands, weary that she will exhaust him, or as the literal translation reads, ‘Give him a black eye!’ I don’t believe, nor do most biblical scholars, that we should equate the actions of God with those of the judge. Our relationship to God is not one where we pester God to the point that God gives us what we want – that is a pretty immature kind of faith. Yet one thing we can gleam from this parable is that, sometimes, it definitely feels like we are pestering God, that we are wrestling with God. The moral of the parable, then, is that our faith should be persistent and relentless, not so that we get what we want, but so that we always remember that God does, in fact, hear us and will bring closure, even if it is not always the kind that we were seeking.
The persistent widow and the unjust judge (artist unknown).
The story of Jacob and the parable of the persistent widow both speak to something to which we all can relate, and that is the struggle we sometimes feel with God. There isn’t a person among us who has not wrestled with God, sometimes all night like Jacob. There isn’t a person among us who has not felt like they have pestered God again and again again with their request. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there the last two years, sure, but even in the Before Time we all experienced those moments. When a person died suddenly. When we lost a job. When we went through a divorce. When life made little sense.
I can remember many times sitting in the parish oratory or at a coffee shop and talking to someone who would open up and share their experiences, and they would be scared because they had been taught that you don’t wrestle with God or question God. You just accept everything that comes your way, without exception. Yet this is contrary to what the Bible actually shows us. It’s not just Jacob or the parable of the persistent woman. Maybe the best example, of course, is Job. We don’t read nearly enough from Job, but that story is one that often gets misinterpreted. We celebrate his patience or the fact that Job coined the phrase, ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ but we sometimes forget that Job eventually cursed God and cursed the day he was born. Job, for those who don’t know, is the oldest story in the Bible, whose roots can be traced back to an era long before Judaism existed, and its lesson is older than our Scriptures themselves, the lesson that part of what it means to be human is to wrestle with the Divine.
Job by Leon Bonnat (1880)
That may sound like a downer, but I actually believe it is Good News. Here’s why. When we accept the message that we shouldn’t question God, we minimize our experiences of pain and those of others. But when we wrestle with God and dare to ask questions like “Why did this happen?” - or even the question Jesus himself asks on the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”- we open ourselves up to an actual two-way conversation with God. That conversation might not be easy or short – it seldom is either– but in the end, out of that wrestling, out of that struggle comes clarity and understanding, comes the closure that we need, even if it isn’t what we were originally seeking.
We may often come to the Scriptures looking for the message that makes us feel good, only to be hit with stories like these. They’re not easy to hear, but they speak to a deep truth, the truth that when we wrestle with God we are not doing anything wrong. We are, in fact, growing deeper in our relationship with God, deeper in our knowledge and love of God, deeper in our understanding for how God is living and moving in our very being. It is similar to a marriage. I’ve probably learned the most about my spouse, myself, and our relationship in the times we’ve wrestled with each other. They’ve actually made our relationship even stronger and more meaningful. I suspect the same is true for y’all’s relationships, with your partners and with God.
So if you find yourself questioning God, wrestling with God, know that it’s ok. If you feel like you’re pestering God, that’s fine because God can take it. And in the end, you might come away changed, maybe with even with a limp, but one way or another, when the bell sounds, you’ll find the closer you need.